Take Back Your Time
Time is the ultimate equalizer. It is the one thing we all have in common. We all have the same 24 hours in any given day.
You probably have many responsibilities that you must tend to on a daily basis, such as your job, your spouse, your children, and more. You may feel like your calendar is completely full of so many obligations, leaving you little to no time for yourself. This may cause you to feel overwhelmed or trapped, with no time to do the things you truly want to do.
The truth is, you must make time for yourself. When you make time for your dreams and prioritize creating a life you love, it will improve every aspect of your life. When you are at your best, you can give your best to others.
The question becomes, how can you make more time for yourself? How can you optimize the structure of your days to assure that you have enough time to do the things that are most important to you?
Determine What is Important to You
The first step in taking back your time is determining why you need or want the extra time. Think about what matters most to you—not your spouse, not your parents, not your favorite influencer—you. Is it your health and wellness? Spending more time with your loved ones? Traveling? Giving time to your church or community? Building your own business? Only you can answer these questions. Take some time to write down the things that are most important to you.
Build Awareness
The next step is to build awareness around what your current schedule is like. Spend one or two days to write down all the habits, activities, and tasks that make up a normal day for you. During this exercise, do not judge yourself—the goal is to simply build awareness around the current structure of a typical day for you. At the end of doing this, put a + next to any habit, activity, or task that positively serves you, a – for anything that negatively serves you, and an o for anything that is neutral.
Create a “Not To Do List”
Next, you want to try to eliminate the activities that are not serving you. A “Not To Do List” is a list of all the habits, activities, and tasks that hold you back from success. For example, not checking your phone before a certain time, not hitting the snooze button, not drinking alcohol before bed, and not wasting hours on social media.
Eat the Frog
The next step is to prioritize the tasks that are most important to you first thing in the day. Mark Twain said, “If you eat a frog for breakfast, chances are that will be the worst thing you have to do all day.” The point of the quote is that if you start your day by tackling your hardest but most important tasks, even if you don’t do that much for the rest of the day, you will still have accomplished a lot. For most people, the morning is a controllable time before the chaos of life ensues. It makes sense to do the things that are most important to you first thing in the morning. You might also consider creating a morning routine to anchor your day. What makes up your routine will depend on what’s most important to you. It could be exercise, journaling, meditating, making a healthy breakfast, or even working on your side hustle—it just needs to be important to you. Put yourself first and do whatever is important to you as early as you can in the day.
The truth is, you will never feel like you have enough time. There will always be something going on in your life that seems to provide a good rationale for putting off your goals. You must make time for what is important to you and make your choices accordingly. That is how you take back your time.
